"Turn right and never meet that man. Turn right, and change the world!"

— Fortune Teller

The Doctor and Donna drop by the Chinese-inspired planet Shan Shen, a long way from Earth. The Doctor does some shopping while Donna lets herself be talked into a free fortune-telling session. But the fortune-teller is interested in Donna's past, not her future... specifically, she wants to know how Donna came to meet the Doctor, going all the way back to a single decision. Something creepy and crawly moves towards Donna and latches onto her back.

Remember "The Runaway Bride", when we first met Donna? She was marrying a guy she'd met at work. Flashback to Donna's first day at H.C. Clements. Her mum comes along, and harangues Donna about interviewing for a different job, a better job, with some guy she knows. All Donna has to do is turn right instead of left at a certain intersection, and she'll never have started at H.C. Clements, never have met Lance, never have been sucked aboard a TARDIS in flight, never — and this is the crucial bit — told the Doctor to stop when he was murdering a Racnoss nest. So, the Doctor drowned in the Thames and died that Christmas Eve, and Donna didn't much care, because she never knew who he was. To Donna, the only thing out of place seems to be the fascination her friends have with something on her back that they glimpse, and the young blonde woman who's suddenly turned up looking very distressed.

But Earth, as it turned out, would end up caring very much. When Royal Hope Hospital was transported to the moon the Plasmavore was stopped, but the hospital was trapped on the Moon until it was too late. All but one person in the hospital died — including medical student Martha Jones — and the Earth escaped destruction only because one Sarah Jane Smith, at the hospital with Luke, Maria and Clyde, was able to deactivate the Death Ray before dying.

Without the Doctor around to stop it, the starship Titaniccrashed into London the following Christmas, destroying the entire city with its nuclear engine. Donna and her family are OK, because they left London for Christmas on the advice of a mysterious blonde woman.

Mysterious blonde woman — dimension-hopping Rose Tyler — keeps popping up in Donna's life as it continues to suck. Aid promised from the United States to the victims of the nuking of London is cancelled after the Adipose kill millions of them. The Sontaran stratagem very nearly succeeds, as well; it is stopped only by the Torchwood Three team, at the cost of their lives and leaving Jack stranded on the Sontaran home-world.

And Donna and her family are forcibly moved to Leeds, while the minorities are shipped off to "labour camps". One night, when Donna notices that The Stars Are Going Out, she finally decides to follow the mysterious blonde woman.

The woman, remaining nameless, explains who the Doctor was and that he was never supposed to die. She takes Donna to a UNIT operations base where they have hooked up the Doctor's TARDIS to their equipment which includes a circle of mirrors. The blonde woman and UNIT use the equipment to show Donna the presence of a large beetle riding her back, though they can't remove it. Instead she tells Donna that they are going to correct the timeline, but it requires sending Donna herself back to fix it. After realising this might wipe her from existence, Donna agrees to do so, and is told to stop herself from turning right on that fateful day.

The time jump leaves her half a mile away with only a few minutes to get to the intersection, which is impossible. Without any other options, Donna throws herself in front of an oncoming vehicle, fatally wounding her, but creating a traffic jam for which her earlier, impatient self is unwilling to wait, and makes the left turn. As the alternative Donna dies the blonde woman appears again to her, and before she blacks out tells her a two-word message to give to the Doctor...

Donna wakes up in the fortune teller's room, the Time Beetle having fallen off her back dead. The fortune teller scurries away as the Doctor arrives. Donna explains what she saw, and the Doctor explains that the Time Beetle is part of the Trickster's Brigade. Donna wasn't picked for any special reason: stealing timelines is just what the Trickster's Brigade does, and it usually has no major effect. Donna just happened to be a bit more involved in time-shattering events than the usual victim. The Doctor casually comments all the coincidences around Donna, when she suddenly recalls the blonde woman. The Doctor, instantly alert, asks Donna for more information, and Donna repeats her last words:

The Doctor races outside to find every banner and sign, even the TARDIS doors, now saying "BAD WOLF". Upon running inside the TARDIS, closely followed by Donna, he hears the Cloister Bellhas started tolling.

Donna: Doctor, what is it? What's Bad Wolf?

The Doctor: It's the end of the universe.

Tropes:

Adult Fear: Great Britain devolves into a police state and things get increasingly bleak with economic depression. It turns out it was a parallel universe, a nightmare realm, and Donna manages to return history to its old, proper course. But still. It's made all the worse by the obvious Holocaust parallels at one point. The government sends foreigners away to "labour camps" as they're unable to simply deport them. Donna, while agitated, clearly doesn't grasp the situation in full. Her grandfather, Wilfred, lived through WWII and cries as he watches history repeat itself.

America Saves the Day: Subverted. They were going to send aid money to help Britain, but the Adipose disaster was relocated to America and ended up killing 60 million Americans, so they focused on recovering from that instead.

Anyone Can Die: Taken to ridiculous levels in the alternate dimension. An entire hospital killed with only one survivor, the entirety of London killed when the Titanic crashes and 60 million Americans killed and converted to Adipose. Among the confirmed dead are Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones. Jack cannot die, so he was taken to Sontar after the alternate path "The Poison Sky" took.

Bad Future: Without the Doctor there to stop several of the Season's events, the state of the Earth gets worse and worse.

Berserk Button: Donna is so broken down by the alternate universe that when Rose tells her she's brilliant, she gets angry.

Best of All Possible Worlds: The alternate universe in this episode is very much a worse place. We have it created when Donna turns right, which causes the Doctor to die at the Thames Barrier when he defeats the Racnoss, and several contemporary attacks on Earth to cause mass casualties, and/or wipes out several of the Doctor's allies (including Martha, whom he never met here). Naturally, Donna set her time-line back on its proper course at the end of the episode.

The bug on Donna's back is confirmed to be a nod to the spider on Sarah Jane's back from the classic series episode "Planet of the Spiders". The idea of it consuming the time she could have spent is straight from the Weeping Angels.

Cosy Catastrophe: The middle part, at least — before the Emergency Government starts "relocating" immigrants, almost certainly to their deaths, and the stars start going out.

Crapsack World: Without the Doctor there to do his thing, the world gets worse and worse. Although at least we avoided the Master's reign of terror (though that was cosmic-retconned away anyway) as without the Doctor's intervention he presumably died at the end of time.

Weirdly, Earth doesn't immediately turn into New Pyrovillia with no one to cause the eruption of Vesuvius.

Deader Than Dead: The Doctor is apparently too dead to regenerate. Though we're pretty sure that drowning in the Thames can't bring a Time Lord back. It's also implied that the Doctor was feeling so depressed and alone after of the events of the previous episode that he doesn't really care whether he lives or dies, which would explain why he is killed so easily and doesn't regenerate. Meeting Donna eased that loneliness and allowed him to reconnect with the world, which is why Donna was able to snap him back, so he wouldn't die with the Racnoss.

Death by Despair: The Doctor, without Donna, wasn't willing to save himself during the business with the Racnoss. When the TARDIS finally appears, it's all but outright said she's going the same way.

Rose basically stands in for the Doctor in this episode, including the dimensional comings and goings, name obfuscation, misplaced enthusiasm, technobabble and hints of an Omniscient Morality License. But when you live in a Crapsack World like this one and you're not used to the Doctor's shenanigans, all these attributes would probably make the Doctor seem like a bit of an asshole... and Rose does come off as a bit of an asshole.

Also deconstructs the idea that Doctor Who-level disasters could be common in an otherwise familiar human world, showing the level of human suffering, death, economic depression, and downright boredom that would result if the Doctor weren't there to stop every last one of them, resulting in the aforementioned Crapsack World.

Expospeak Gag: "Keep the jacket on at all times, it's insulation against temporal feedback. This will correspond to local time wherever you land. This... is to combat dehydration" (offers ordinary glass of water).

For Want of a Nail: Donna turns right instead of left, and the whole world — probably the whole universe — changes.

From Bad to Worse: Supreme example of this trope, in spades. As bad as the Doctor's universe can be, Donna's World is downright horrifying by comparison. Everything that could Kick the Dog does in this episode. Worse still when you consider what the Doctor's would-be companions go through:

Martha Jones never meets the Doctor, and sacrifices her life to save one man when the Royal Hope Hospital is stolen by the Judoon.

Sarah Jane Smith never meets him again, but is able to resolve the situation at the hospital at the cost of her life — and the lives of her teenaged son, Luke and his friends— allowing the Judoon to return it to Earth.

Without the Doctor's expertise (or Martha's UNIT connections), Torchwood is forced to deal with the Sontarans, ending with Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones igniting the atmosphere by blowing up the Sontaran mother-ship from within it.

And of course, Donna Noble. In the year following her father's death she is fired from her job, narrowly dodges the nuclear explosion of London, is shoved into the kitchen of a home housing dozens of people with no money and no identity, only for the United Kingdom to start shipping immigrants to "labour camps" in a desperate attempt to save their own. Oh, and there's this time-travelling blonde stalking her...

Also how the Doctor died in the first place — after killing all the Racnoss and without Donna to snap him out of it, he either left it too late to get away from the flood or was so despondant with Rose gone, that he just let himself drown..

Donna jumped in front of a lorry to cause a pile-up so her past self will turn left and undo all the damage.

Humans Need Aliens: Lampshaded when the world starts to decay and even reality itself ceases to exist without the Doctor's intervention.

In Spite of a Nail: It doesn't matter whether Donna turns left because she's being stubborn or because there's a traffic pile-up, or that she has a mysterious dead doppelgänger.

It Began with a Twist of Fate: It's revealed that the only reason Donna Noble ever got embroiled in the Doctor's life at all was because one day, she turned left, not right. Good thing she did, too; that same episode reveals that turning right led to the Doctor's death, the nuclear destruction of London, and the end of reality itself. Yikes.

It's a Wonderful Plot: And just to evoke this trope even more, the point of incident takes place before Christmas.

Mood Whiplash: One minute, Donna and her mother are having a truly depressing conversation about their current condition, then Donna hears singing from the next room and goes to yell at them, until she sees Wilfred's joining. Smash Cut to the entire family singing along with their housemates, the first time they've been happy for a long time, the next they hear gunfire from outside.

Prophecy Twist: Donna will die... well, she did. In a way. Although the next episode suggests that wasn't it, and Donna is still a bad insurance risk.

Putting on the Reich: The British government seems to do this, if Wilfred's comments when the Colasantos are taken away are to be believed:

Wilf: Labour camps. That's what they called them last time. Donna: ...what d'you mean? Wilf: It's happening again. Donna: What is? ::Cut to the perpetually optimistic Mr Colasanto, who is hugging his wife and breaking down in tears as they are hauled away.note This is all Unfortunate Truth in Television as well: During the Second World War many Italian families were put to work in labour camps due to Italy being allies with Germany.

Real Life Writes the Plot: The reason Donna doesn't have anything to make her cling to her life in this alternative universe is that Russell T Davies gave up on his original idea of her having children during the middle of this havoc, since she already had a good marriage and children in Steven Moffat's episode, which would air two weeks earlier. Also, the Doctor hints that there's something strange about the multiple alternative universes popping up around her because Russell and Steven were both using the same idea. It was worked into the plot after they exchanged e-mails about the episodes.

Stepford Smiler: Rocco, who puts on his usual cheer as his entire family is being set off to a "labor camp".

Tempting Fate: When the ATMOS starts poisoning the sky, Donna asks Rose how it could get worse. She finds out very soon.

Took a Level in Jerkass: It's made extremely clear Donna's mellowing out was due to the Doctor — she's just as stubborn and obnoxious as she was in the Christmas special.

What If?: ...when Donna came to a certain intersection, she made a right hand turn to a photocopier business instead of turning left, to work at a security firm?

What the Hell Is That Accent?: Billie Piper apparently lost the accent she had used as Rose in Series 1 and 2, so she speaks with a noticeable lisp. She also has a pronounced overbite that she never used to have, mildly affecting her speech (and possibly causing the lisp).

Wide-Eyed Idealist: Donna is laughably naive in this episode, and severely overestimates how necessary secretaries are.

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